While both large sequentially-operating and parallel-operating supercomputers are known in the art, massively-parallel operation is to be preferred for those computationally-intensive applications which require a vast amount of data computation and data communication to be carried out in real time. Examples of such applications include weather modeling and medical imaging. Real-time analysis of such complex scenarios encountered by such applications operate on very large data sets.
The growth of advanced problem size has been such that the maximum rate of communication and computation of these prior-art massively-parallel supercomputers, including the Princeton Engine (PE), is insufficient to provide real-time solutions therefor. Therefore, there is a need for a larger massively-parallel supercomputer which would meet both the bandwidth and computation requirements (an I/O bandwidth up to 1200 MBytes/sec, and a peak computational rate up to 9.6 Teraops/sec) needed to provide solutions to such computationally-intensive problems. Further, although sequential supercomputers are capable of time-shared multi-user operation, the design of all prior-art massively-parallel supercomputers does not permit them to have this capability.